Hardware Versions

There are at least 5 different versions of the RM 200 as indicated by a letter trailing the version number. The C version can be distinguished from older versions by having both EISA and PCI slots on a riser board that sits in the middle of the main board. The C version is the only version supported by Linux/MIPS.

Firmware

The RM 200 systems use ARC firmware. With a special floppy disk containing firmware it is possibly to reconfigure RM 200 systems from little to big endian and vice versa. Unfortunately the firmware is copyrighted and Linux/MIPS project neither has a copy of the big endian firmware disk nor the permission to distribute the firmware or any other source.

Linux Support

Due to lack of a system in a big endian system for development only the little endian configuration is supported under Linux. No Linux distribution supports the RM 200 out of the box so any installation will require some Linux skills and an additional Linux system to boot the RM 200 from via network. Linux support for the RM200 is available since kernel version 2.1 (requires out of tree patches). Due to a hardware problem for which for a long time no workaround was known Linux 2.2 and 2.3 were unsupported on RM 200; late 2.5 versions fixes these issues. Latest successfully tested version is 2.6.10-rc2 and is considered stable.